The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Judge hopes to start swinging bat in next week
NEW YORK — Aaron Judge took a seat in the back of the Oakley Store in Manhattan on Friday morning for a Q&A to promote his new endorsement deal for its eyewear. But this was Day 15 of the Aaron Judge wrist watch, as in: When will his chip fracture be healed so that he can start swinging again?
So the first question from the media was about the state of the Yankees right fielder’s right wrist. It’s still out of order from the errant pitch thrown by the Royals’ Jakob Junis at Yankee Stadium on July 26, but Judge appears to be getting closer to picking up a bat. The Yankees originally said it would be about three weeks before he could swing again in a game situation.
“The wrist, it’s feeling all right,” Judge said. “It could be better. But I’m still right on track. Hopefully, I’ll swing the bat here in the next couple of days, next week, at sometime. We don’t have a timetable on that yet. But I know pretty shortly we should start ramping it up and get going, get swinging again.”
Judge was batting .285 with 26 homers and 61 RBIs when he went down. The Yankees dropped six of their next nine, capped by getting swept across four games in Boston. But they have won four straight after opening an 11-game homestand with a win over Texas Thursday night to move back to 30 games above .500 at 72-42.
That Boston massacre seemed to take the Yankees out of the AL East race. They were eight behind the Red Sox heading into Friday night’s games. But Judge refuses to concede the division.
“August just started,” Judge said. “We’ve still got August and September. A lot of crazy things can happen. So for us, our goal has always been the division. It doesn’t matter how many games we’re back. We’re going to keep still fighting for that because we’ve got a good team.”
The endorsement deals keep coming for one of the faces of the game. Besides Oakley, Pepsi, Rawlings, adidas, Panini and JBL are some of the other companies on the roster for the 26-year-old two-time AllStar.
“Coming from Linden, California, with a couple of thousand people there and now I’m in New York City getting a chance to play for the Yankees and partner up with those great companies,” Judge said. “It’s a dream come true.”